Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- BAFTA Games Awards: All the Winners from 2003 to Today
- Clair Obscur Completes the Sweep by Winning “Best Game” at 2025-2026 BAFTA Games Awards
- Boss Fight Books to Get a New Look for Richard Moss’s “Age of Empires”
- GDC Awards: All the Winners from 1996 to Today
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Wins “Game of the Year” at 2025-2026 GDC Awards
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- We Pitched a Museum a 1993 Game Hint Line (And They Actually Said Yes) – Yarn Spinner (2026)
- The History Of The Word “Metroidvania” And How It Spread – A Critical Hit (2025)
- Creator of Hit Game Shovel Knight Is at a ‘Make or Break’ Moment – Bloomberg (2025)
- Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history – Design Room (2025)
- In 2005, games started rewiring our brains – The AV Club (2025)
Most Recent: Top Story
The Last of Us Review: Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave
When Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was first unleashed upon the PlayStation 3, Naughty Dog managed to take the best aspects of the Tomb Raider formula and made it better by building on it with likable characters and Indiana Jones-esque hijinks. With The Last of Us, they have once again reinvigorated a flagging genre, the third-person survival shooter, by making it serious, personal, and scary.
Posted in PS3, Reviews, Top Story
Tagged The Last of Us
The Games of July 2013
We’re all in agreement here at Warp Zoned: it’s a slow month for game releases. But this is a great thing, because it means we can stop beating our wallets to death, and also catch up on some of our backlogs. It also means we can save up money for the months to come, which promise to be expensive. Read on to see what we’ll be doing during this slow summer month! (more…)
Warpback: What We Played in June 2013
June was a pretty great month for video game releases, as you can see by the eclectic mix of what we were playing here at Warp Zoned. We played a wide range of games across several systems – even one on the NES! Read on to find out just what we were doing the last 30 days… (more…)
Animal Crossing: New Leaf Review: No Place Like Home
Let me get a little personal before this review begins. My regular, full-time job is that of an automobile claims adjuster. My day consists of assisting people whose lives have been turned upside-down by getting into automobile accidents. People react to these situations very differently, and at times I have no choice but to be a punching bag for some. The job, as expected, gets stressful. Hell, even the great Daniel Day-Lewis couldn’t handle what I do. A few times during the summer, I will take a Friday off and spend a long weekend at my parents’ lake house in Indiana. During those weekends, I fish, go on boat rides, watch a horror movie or two, and relax. Come Monday, my batteries are recharged and I’m ready to take on the claims.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf is my video game lake house. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, Reviews, Top Story
Tagged Animal Crossing: New Leaf
The New Conservatism of Nintendo
Nintendo has never been known for having a liberal attitude. Even with a diverse range of characters, the publisher has fallen back on reimagining their various iconic characters (such as Mario, Link, and Samus) through the decades. When the company was still battling with rival Sega, it was Nintendo that took the moral high ground, often censoring blood or religious imagery from games on their systems, most famously in the original Mortal Kombat, where blood was replaced with sweat and the finishing moves were toned down. In recent years, Nintendo has even throttled back the power of its consoles (compare the Wii and Wii U with the PS3/Xbox 360 and PS4/Xbox One) versus competing systems. However, with the end of this year’s E3 Expo came a decisive contrast in how gamers and journalists alike perceived Nintendo, and that for better or worse, the company has entered a new era of conservatism. (more…)
Pandora’s Tower Review: An Exquisite Passage
Pandora’s Tower is the third game published by Nintendo in Japan that has made it to North America thanks to the activist efforts of Operation Rainfall. It is also the one I was most excited for of the three. The strange, beautiful trailers filtering here from Japan intrigued me, and the combat system looked refreshing and different. While the graphics are limited on the Wii, the strength of both the gameplay and the narrative drew me in. When I finally played the game, it was even weirder than I’d expected, but even with the weaknesses, I felt my 25 hours were well spent. (more…)
Posted in Reviews, Top Story, Wii
Tagged Pandora's Tower
You Review: A Book I Wanted to Like
Austin Grossman’s latest novel, You, is a fictional story of video game developers set on solving a mystery embedded within their engine by their deceased friend. Grossman (who also wrote Soon I Will Be Invincible) has been a game designer for over 20 years, and gives readers a unique glimpse inside the world of the game developer. As Russell starts his new job at Black Arts, we get insight on the lives of developers, from how each game is developed (start to finish) to the relationships between those who create it. But in this story, we get even more – as Russell races against the clock to fix the bug that could potentially destroy the company, he goes back and forth from past to present and back, detailing his relationships with his current co-workers – and former friends. (more…)
Injustice: Gods Among Us Review: Mortal Kom-ics
It’s easy to think of Injustice: Gods Among Us as the next logical step after the two previous titles from NetherRealm Studios: 2008’s Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe and the 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot. But Injustice is also more (and less) than the sum of its parts. It will be familiar to anyone who has played the Mortal Kombat reboot, but it also does new things that really tap into the “Gods Among Us” angle.